At 79, Christian Henry is well over the legal retirement age. This doctor still receives, by choice, patients from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. in his office in La Réole, in Gironde, installed in a pretty stone residence which also houses his accommodation. He graduated in 1970 and it will be exactly half a century since he opened his practice as a liberal, next October.
This well-groomed, sharp-eyed doctor doesn’t want to sit at his desk so the interview doesn’t look like a consultation. The symbols make sense for someone who has validated a specialty in neuropsychiatry and then directed the disability and geriatrics medicine department at La Réole hospital, until he is 65 years old. He does not really feel like he is continuing his career by continuing to practice as a liberal, with currently around 2,500 patients.
“The better it goes, the more I tell myself that it’s not a job”, explains the almost octogenarian who does not look his age (all his patients tell him) and who assures that he “never drags his feet to get up in the morning”. But be careful, he doesn’t want to be held up as a model, “I have no lesson to teach”. Quicker to talk about cinema or literature than politics, Doctor Henry, when asked for his opinion on the pension reform, replies “that we must let people do what they want. It’s silly to have people arrested like that, except for some, who work on the assembly line for example, and who are exhausted of course”.
A social life, with patients
If he is not angry that some of his colleagues might have thought that he was working the old way, without a computer, based on a photo published in The Generalist, he does not kiss all the developments of modernity. What drives this learned doctor is his relationship with the patient, whom he considers a “subject” and not a file. He has trouble with the functioning of medical centers, where you can make an appointment with your doctor but be received by a replacement. “And I don’t stop at 6 p.m. and I work practically six days a week,” he explains. I answer at night if someone calls me, but I don’t take call. And you won’t see it on Doctolib, you have to go through the secretariat. He even accepts new patients, harbingers of new encounters which he is delighted with. “But the secretaries do not want too much,” he slips.
With two houses in the south of France and an apartment in Paris, the Réolais doctor has no financial problem. It’s really not for the money that he continues to work. “My life is a life with the other, social,” he explains. And since the death of his wife, five years ago, it is also a way of escaping loneliness. “I can’t quite digest the story, I’m a little deep in my relationship with patients,” he admits. She was a midwifery gynecologist and they were both working at the time of her sudden death following a heart attack.
“I’m still useful for something”
We feel that for Doctor Henry, his work is a way to stay upright. “I feel like I’m still moving, I tell myself that I’m not ready and that I’m still useful for something,” he comments. He does not feel tired but agrees that his choice to continue his freelance activity is based on his physical health. “If I had paralysis, for example, I wouldn’t continue, that’s the engine,” he points out. He continues to golf regularly with his friends to keep in shape.
On the head side, we quickly understand that it is not the intellectual curiosity that is lacking in this practitioner. Multiplying literary and cinematographic references, he launches at regular intervals “you get it”, to ensure that he always has the attention of his interlocutor. “What I am sure of is that what saves us from our animality is art, music, aesthetics, culture, reading, interesting conversation etc. “, he philosophizes. A cinephile, he was marked for life by watching two films at the age of 17: The Seventh Seal And wild strawberries, by Ingmar Bergmann. In the latter, a doctor at the end of his career recalls his memories of his life as a country doctor.
And Doctor Henry, who grew up in La Réole, about an hour from Bordeaux, claims his rural career while being sorry that his colleagues are reluctant to come and settle in the sector. When they work there, they very rarely choose to live there. “We can very well have an important intellectual life here”, he assures us, wanting as proof that he and his wife attended five to six plays a year at The French Comedy in Paris.
The approach of 80 years nevertheless makes him reflect. “I think I will say stop at some point, he slips. We don’t see ourselves as we are. And, it’s true that I’m not tired but, in the evening, I can be a little more dizzy”. The next minute, he tells how he would decorate his walls if he had “to redo his waiting room”, explaining that suggested portraits of Einstein, Montaigne, Beethoven and Kubrick would have their place…